


It'll Be Quite a Shock to Breathe This Air, to Discover Loss

by desertions



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post Season 2 Finale, save alice 2k17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 21:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11952564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desertions/pseuds/desertions
Summary: Wynonna never wanted to be a mother. Wynonna-centric with slight Wyndoc leanings and reference to Wyndolls as well





	It'll Be Quite a Shock to Breathe This Air, to Discover Loss

Wynonna never wanted to be a mother, she never dreamed of white picket fences or marriage or any of things girls normally grow up being told they should want. She learned pretty early on that wasn’t in the card. She lost her virginity to a guy much older than her when she was thirteen and all she learned was the same lesson she learned from all the adults in her life, nobody was going to look out for you in this world but you. She doesn’t know to do normal relationships. She doesn’t know how to do normal.

She always planned, if she got pregnant, to abort it. But the widows mess with time and once again in her life choices are taken away from her. So she carries the baby. Fine. She’ll give it away and her life will go back to normal. It seemed so simple.

Nothing is ever simple, it turns out. She wasn’t expecting to love it. Her. Alice Michelle. Her perfect little daughter. She only got a brief moment before she had to hand her over to Waverly to whisk her safely out of town. She may never see her again. This is why you don’t get attached, because if you love something, you can lose it. All Wynonna has ever known is that the people she loves the most leave her, usually by her hands.

Her daddy. Willa. Shorty. Alice. How many times will she give things up until there is nothing left inside her to give? Until she is hollowed out and stuffed with glue, a makeshift piece of bad jokes and flippant remarks with nothing real left to say.

Everyone treats her like she’s fragile now. It pisses her off. Waverly touches her arm and asks her if she’s okay and she wants to scream in her sister’s face. No. She isn’t okay. Nothing about this is okay. And she’s angry, she’s fucking pissed off because if Waverly had just trusted her she could have broken the seal on her own terms, could have given birth on the homestead like she planned –

There could have been more time. There wasn’t enough time.

She doesn’t say any of that. She jams a donut in her face instead and brushes past her on the way out of the precinct. Talking about her feelings has never been a strong point of Wynonna’s, and now more than ever she finds herself unable to find the words to fill the holes left in her. 

After couple of weeks or so she starts training with Dolls again. Or she tries to. He makes a comment about how she should be back to normal again soon and she punches him square in the nose with strength she didn’t realize she possessed. Like she doesn’t notice how her stomach is flattening, acting as if nothing was ever there all. Does he realize how empty she feels? How hollow? He smiles at her sometimes like he’s waiting for something she was never even sure she wanted from him. Or anyone. It’s too late to want it now. She can’t allow herself want anything –

She has to fight. She has to win so her daughter doesn’t end up like her, sad and hollowed out, unable to do anything but lose people. Wynonna’s life has been a Shakespearean tragedy since she was born but she refuses to allow Alice’s to be. Fuck that. It’s the only reason she hunts down her mother. The mother who left her years ago and never looked back.

(Maybe Wynonna could never picture herself as a mother because of how her own one had acted, the thought hadn’t occurred to her before).

She can’t sleep in her own room. She sees the fucking pillows she picked out, the stupid nest she made, and it makes her chest ache. She doesn’t want to move them, as if doing so admits the reality. Her daughter is gone and she might never come back and Wynonna never wanted this so why the fuck is she so sad about it?

(She’s so tired of losing)

She sneaks into Doc’s bed, most nights. It’s not for the reasons some might think – her body is still recovering too much for sex -- but simply an act of comfort and lonely desperation. He has lost too. He died. He came back. He lost his immortality and their daughter in one fell swoop. (She notices the red marks on his wrists but she does not ask about them, she is not sure she can stomach the answer right now). It was not long ago that another woman was sharing his bed, though in very different terms. Wynonna thinks a lot about Rosita and how she drove the other woman to desperate choices. If anyone understands acts of desperation, it’s Wynonna. She’ll never forgive the revenant for the acts she took but she understands them.

She wishes she didn’t.

Sometimes, Doc wraps his arms around her and cradles her close to him as if he was afraid of losing her too. Other times they lie next to one another, backs facing each other as if they cannot stand to look at one another’s faces anymore. Even in those moments they don’t want to be alone. For as much as everyone else thinks they understand, they don’t. This isn’t Waverly’s kid, or Dolls’, or anyone but hers and Doc’s. An Earp and a Holliday, their birthrights have made their daughter into something people wanted to steal. 

(Wynonna hates Wyatt, most nights, for what he has done to them, to her)

It’s been three weeks when Nicole approaches her with an evelope. Inside are prints of pictures she took of Alice before they handed her off. Waverly had told her not to but she thought maybe – she wasn’t sure but she figured it was Wynonna’s choice whether she wanted to keep them or not. After weeks of walking around numb and dead inside Wynonna begins weeping in the middle of the precinct. The redhead looks alarmed but wraps her arms around her all the same. 

Wynonna never wanted to be a mother. She would argue even now she isn’t one, she gave up that right the moment she sent her daughter away and even now she knows that was the only thing she could do –

But man if she didn’t wish that for once, something good could have stayed. That everything she loved didn’t have to be lost. She dreams that night of her daughter, of Willa, of Shorty and her father and everyone she couldn’t save. Tears are streaming down her face when she wakes up to Doc running his fingers through her hair, kissing her forehead gently.

He doesn’t tell her everything is going to be okay; she appreciates the honesty. At least someone is being honest.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first real fanfic I've written in like three years so I have no idea if it's any good, but that finale ruined me.


End file.
